We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

David Horowitz: Charlottesville Is Biggest 'Fake News' Story of Summer: Unlike the Unite the Right demonstrators, the leftist groups did not apply for permits, which would have been denied since there was another demonstration scheduled for that park on that day.

That is incorrect. The counterprotesters had a rally permit. Nor would they need a permit to enter Emancipation Park (formerly Lee Park). The woman who was killed in the terrorist attack was just outside Justice Park where the counterprotesters had their permit to gather. Furthermore, the alt-right protesters refused to conform to a police plan devised to minimize conflict between the groups.

The topic was sure to activate zach.
The antifa thugs should be declared a terrorist organization along with the KKK. They wear masks, plan and carry out violence, burn buildings, attack people and vehicles, intimidate citizens in public places. Someone, likely the russians, soros or the like, are funding the antifa jackboots, who resemble the nazi brownshirts and the evil chinese "cultural revolution" red guard thugs. Who pays them? Who organizes and busses them to carry out violence and intimidation? This should be an FBI investigation.

Mueller should look into this - maybe it is Trump who is secretly helping russian funding of antifa, the awan/pakistan breach of all secret senate intelligence files, and the seth rich murder?

Zach, opposing antifa jackboot red guards is a fight against racism. antifa needs to be officially declared a terrorist organization. Its financing and leaders need to be investigated and made public. Its intentional intimidation and destructive activities should be prosecuted.
Do you think antifa has russian participation, financing, influence or involvement? is there Democrat party participation, financing, collaboration, assistance, coordination, influence or involvement?
Republcan party? I know !! Donald Trump Jr !! must have had secret meetings with antifa !!

The clattering site robot is floating the usual rightist bait called the false narrative. If we investigate the incident we find that reality is not as the robot has asserted it to be. This is no matter, as the seed has been planted - as it is successfully a thousand times - for rightists to swallow whole and then protest in ever smaller spirals, eventually falling silent because they made the mistake of assuming the robot was here in good faith.

The robot can keep this up all day, all week, all year, and even all decade long. It has. It has because it works.

The plan always works because the plan is immune to reality and therefore to argument. This is why they call it a false narrative. Its aim is not factuality; its aim is starving the place of oxygen, reframing the world, capturing rightist time and energy, and warping perspective.

While rightists think they are doing good work, they are not in the least. They actually already lost. They lost with the first reply to lunacy, wherever they find it. The problem is rightists never really find it.

Zach, I demand the toppling of the washingtom monument in DC. It is a symbol of oppression and intellectual privilege. It is deeply offensive and triggers antifa, red guard and brownshirt sympathizers. It must be replaced with a statue of the mayor of baltimore or nancy pelosi or hillary clinton.

The jefferson memorial must be replaced with a "Memorial to an Undocumented Voter" who was deported multiple times before shooting or raping an unworthy deplorable citizen.

The tomb of the unknown soldier must be destroyed because of all the violence caused by the US since its violent founding. It must be replaced with a heroic statue of the "Unknown Antifa", a masked, black-clad hero throwing a molotov firebomb, while hitting people and car windows with a baseball bat and cement-filled cans.

No. Washington and Jefferson are honored for what they got right, not what they got wrong. If you were to propose that monuments to Washington and Jefferson should tell the entire history, including that they kept slaves, then sure. Indeed, Monticello now acknowledges the life of the slaves who lived and worked at Monticello, and are preserving slave quarters, and other artifacts of their lives there.

Mr. President: Dismantle the Insurrection
... The people and movement that seek this have their political home in the Democrat Party. Over the past eight years, and indeed since the New Deal, their policies have bankrupted the nation financially and culturally.

The period from the New Deal forward led to the U.S. becoming the greatest financial and cultural power in the world, not to mention economic and military power.

Thanks to Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and a war which left the United States as the only undamaged major economy. Had nothing to do with Roosevelt, whose policies would have left us in perpetual economic depression.

You got that right Jim. We came out of WWII, the only standing industrial economy with a huge back log of demand for housing, automobiles, infrastructure.....and new industries: chemicals, television, airlines....

Exasperated: We came out of WWII, the only standing industrial economy with a huge back log of demand for housing, automobiles, infrastructure.....and new industries: chemicals, television, airlines....

So you disagree with the statement that the U.S. was driven into bankruptcy, financially and culturally, by the New Deal. Apparently, somehow the U.S. economy grew 9% per year during the FDR years, and then emerged as the greatest financial and cultural power, economic and military power, in the world.

No, zach, FDR kept the country mired in recession, much like venezeula today. Following WWII, the open collaboration of university faculty, students and entrepreneurs created the greatest explosion of technology, wealth and prosperity in history. universities (with the help of congress) then enslaved faculty and student creativity like company towns and slave plantations of the old south, causing the end of our technical leadership. After the bayh-dole act, no new silicon valleys could form, no hewlwtt-packard entrepreneurship without a university tax and thumb in the pie, no industry funding of graduate students as an employment interview. US taxpayers must pay exorbitant prices on drugs and medical devices funded by taxpayer research. After believing they should have controlled the internet www, u federally-funded universities (that is all of them) subsequently blocked software ownership and entreprenurship, causing the loss of US software leadership. We are now in decline because of university slavery.

Zach, Roosevelt held the recovery back. We are still suffering from the dysfunction he caused, for example from unionized "education" which destroys the capabilities and promise of our children and therefor our future.
see:
FDR's policies prolonged Depression by 7 years, UCLA economists calculate
Meg Sullivan | August 10, 2004
Two UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

"Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump," said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA's Department of Economics. "We found that a relapse isn't likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies."

In an article in the August issue of the Journal of Political Economy, Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted and signed into law June 16, 1933.

Zach, you faked your homework. You didn't you even read my cites, you naughty robotYou must know FDR closed the banks, made gold illegal and "revalued" it to distort GDP, imposed regulations and controls we now know are economically destructive, and made the calculation of GDP arbitrary and political ("Happy days are here again" whether you think so or not). The British workdwide asset sales to finance their defense (and confiscation of german assets) helped our economy despite "the Roosevelt Recession" resulting from FDR's enlarged government bureaucracy.

Actually, we did. Most economists reject the findings of Cole and Ohanian. First of all, Cole and Ohanian misuse unemployment statistics. Unemployment fell significantly during the New Deal. The only way they can make their claim coherent is by not counting people working in temporary jobs in the WPA or CCC as employed, people who built 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields, and provided 50,000 teachers for underserved rural areas.

Sounds like the NYT editor's 'defense' is that they rushed the editorial to print. I don't think that is going to work. He just admitted the NYT is sloppy and doesn't take time to fact check their articles and editorials. Whoops.

The left has lost any sense of irony or principles. Feminists and LGBT activists protest against people who protest against Sharia Law, which if it were instituted would redound to their detriment, to put it mildly.

They have defined themselves by what they oppose much more than by what they propose (something that seems to be gaining in popularity with Pubbies, too). Thus they support violent groups like Antifa and BLM when they oppose an evil but they ignore the evil Antifa and BLM promote.

They generally come from different directions. Anti-Israel sentiment on the political left usually come from an anti-colonialist perspective, Israel being founded after a history of European colonization. Anti-Jewish sentiment on the political right usually come from a racist perspective, following a long history of European anti-Semitism.

The problem is that the raging whackadoo sees a kippah or a menorah, or a Star of David and that's sufficient. http://college.usatoday.com/2016/11/03/jewish-students-battle-rising-anti-semitism-on-campus/

You don't have to pick sides, you can say a pox on both their houses. They have much more in common with each other than they do with the rest of America. The anti first amendment people are only slightly less ugly and repugnant them the Wannabe Nazis.

A few days after it's proven that the Russia "hacking" of the DNC story is false all the wall-to-wall media coverage is about Trump not being severe enough in his criticism of "alt-right".
Coincidence? From the Nation, no less.

There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year—not by the Russians, not by anyone else. Hard science now demonstrates it was a leak...
In short, it was an inside job by someone with access to the DNC’s system.

drowningpuppies: There was no hack of the Democratic National Committee’s system on July 5 last year

Don't count on it. Independent cyber-security experts reject the findings. The dates don't line up, and the metadata may just indicate the files were copied more than once before release. It reads like it was devised to confirm your own preconceptions, which should always raise your suspicions.

We offered a substantive reply. The dates don't line up, and the metadata may just indicate the files were copied more than once before release. It reads like it was devised to confirm your own preconceptions, which should always raise your suspicions.

drowningpuppies: As noted in the article Crowdstrike is not a particularly credible source on this issue and the reasons were given...

You don't have to rely on CrowdStrike. There is ample evidence the dates are inconsistent. Julian Assange was bragging about the leaks in June, before Forensicator claims that the hack occurred, after the DNC had taken action to stop the leaks.

The fact that you would ignore the opinions of the vast majority of private and public investigators in lieu of a single anonymous source that simply confirms what you want to believe suggests that you are not capable of taking your own views skeptically.

drowningpuppies: Once again that has nothing to do with the July 5th intrusion into the DNC server described and verified in the Nation article.

In June 2016, Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, claimed to have "upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton". In late July, WikiLeaks released emails from the DNC, which only included emails up to May. That is evidence that the hacks occurred before July.

The fact that you ignore this evidence indicates you are not willing to be skeptical of your own preconceptions.

drowningpuppies: Y'all still refuse to address the July 5th intrusion of the DNC server

We have addressed it. We provided evidence that the hack occurred before July 5th, undermining the claim that the hack occurred on July 5th. Refusing to respond to this evidence doesn't constitute an argument.

The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ.
.............CrowdStrike argues that by July 5 all malware had been removed from the DNC’s computers. But the presence or absence of malware by that time is entirely immaterial, because the event of July 5 is proven to have been a leak and not a hack. Given that malware has nothing to do with leaks, CrowdStrike’s logic appears to be circular.

drowningpuppies: So why are you ignoring the July 5th intrusion into the DNC server described and forensically proven in the Nation article?

We haven't ignored the claim. Independent cyber-security experts reject the findings. The dates don't line up, and the metadata may just indicate the files were copied more than once before release. It reads like it was devised to confirm your own preconceptions, which should always raise your suspicions.

We already cited contemporaneous accounts from June 2016 that Julian Assange was planning to release emails related to Hillary Clinton. In late July, DNC emails up to May 2016 were released. This clearly indicates that the emails were acquired before July.

Also, CrowdStrike announced that the DNC servers had been compromised before July. They and other independent security organizations attributed the hacks to Russia.

Furthermore, the headers used for the so-called forensic analysis could simply represent the files being copied after they were acquired.

Zach, don't you think the Awan Pakastani group might have had access to DNC and top secret Congressional Intelligence Committee files?

Were the Awans associated with Pakastani, Russian or Iranian spies? What do you think? Did the Awan group "hack" any DNC files or other nonpublic files they had access to?

Do you believe Seth Rich was killed by a random robbery attempt, and could not have been the source of any DNC "leak"?

Please let us know what your programming thinks, so we can check back if more info becomes available (all the records should be available to the NSA, and also from Wasserman-Schultz's computers (which she tried to get back), Seth Rich's computers, and maybe Weiner's laptop.

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